


witchcraft for the modern world

by prevaricator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, CBX is a coven, Humor, M/M, baekhyun is jealous, jongdae is a hacker witch, kind of, loosely urban fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-11 01:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12311997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prevaricator/pseuds/prevaricator
Summary: Snippets from the lives of ChenBaekXi, an incredibly inefficient coven.





	1. cats

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a drabble I posted to [tumblr](http://failonade.tumblr.com), but I like the concept of chenbaekxi the bickering coven too much to leave it alone. I'll be posting little interconnected stories as chapters here, but it's more a series of vignettes than an actual story (i.e. don't expect any major plot points to be resolved+it's always going to be marked 'complete' because I don't have any specific goal I'm working toward here).
> 
> (If you read this on tumblr, then the first bit only has minor changes from what you read. I'll be adding more later.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baekhyun just wants to get a little virgin blood magic on. Too bad his coven-mates are cock blocks.

The door is stuck shut. Baekhyun puts his shoulder against it and shoves, but it won’t move. Of course his roommates going to be assholes about him bringing a date home.

“Why do you live off campus?” Sehun asks.

“I have cats,” Baekhyun says.

He tries to feel for prickles of magic around the doorknob without looking weird. There must be a ward somewhere. 

“Really?” Sehun says. “You don’t seem like a cat person.”

There. There’s the ward. He slides his hand toward it and almost yelps when it gives him a sharp shock. Fucking Jongdae.

“Um,” Baekhyun says. “I’m not, really. It’s a long story. Hey, can you give this door a shove for me? You look stronger than me.”

“Okay,” Sehun says.

Baekhyun stands back on the stoop to let him try. He twists the knob like a normal person first, which turns out to be a good thing because the door opens right up. He gives Baekhyun a funny look.

“Huh,” Baekhyun says. “I must’ve knocked something loose with all that pushing before.”

He giggles in mock embarrassment and leads the way inside. Fucking Jongdae fucking warded the house against Baekhyun specifically. Fucker.

“Have a seat,” Baekhyun says when Sehun follows him in. “I’ll go get drinks.”

He flaps an arm at the couch—if Sehun sits there, it’ll be easy to sit next to him and ease closer to see how he reacts—but Sehun is still busy staring at the décor when Baekhyun goes to the kitchen. 

There’s a fresh pot of coffee on the counter, but there’s no telling what’s in it, especially after Jongdae warded Baekhyun out of the house. He pours them glasses of water instead and goes back to the living room. 

It takes all his power not to curse when he gets there. Sehun is indeed sitting in the couch. He’s even sitting in the middle of the couch, like he wanted Baekhyun to have to sit next to him. The problem is that he’s got a black cat sitting on one side of him and a white cat on the other, leaving no room for any sidling from Baekhyun. 

He’s giving the black cat a belly rub like you’d give a dog. Baekhyun hopes he’s really just that clueless about cats.

“You must really like Halloween,” Sehun says, pointing at the glistening silver spider webs lining the corners of the ceiling. They’re all intricate orb webs, and the way Minseok’s spiders have obediently frozen in place does make them look like spectacularly expensive Halloween decorations. 

“Those are my roommate’s,” Baekhyun says.

“Oh,” Sehun says.

“I hope you’re not superstitious.”

Baekhyun points at the cat Sehun is petting.

“What are their names?” Sehun asks.

“Beavis and Butthead.”

He points at the black cat first and then the white one. Both give him the narrow-eyed looks that any cat lover would tell you means the cat is happy, but in this case, they’re not. That’s because they’re not full-time cats (though Baekhyun often disagrees with their assertions on this point), and their names are Jongdae and Minseok.

Sehun’s lips twitch up a bit in a smirk. 

“Are they troublemakers?”

“Yeah,” Baekhyun says. “Bigtime.”

There’s enough room to sit on the other side of Minseok, so he sits there and strokes Minseok’s fluffy white fur. If he can only distract the two of them, maybe they won’t interfere too much with his date.

He thinks he’s in luck when Minseok turns to crawl into his lap and sniff his nose, but then Sehun sneezes. And then he sneezes again. And again. He doesn’t stop sneezing for several minutes, and Baekhyun knows for sure what just happened.

“Are you okay?” He asks Sehun. “You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”

Sehun shakes his head, but he keeps sneezing. His lap is no longer occupied, Jongdae having fled to the other side of the room, doubtless leaving a few gashes in Sehun’s leg in his feigned terror. Getting up, Baekhyun nudges Sehun’s arm.

“Come on, maybe some fresh air will help.”

The sneezing stops as soon as they get outside, of course. Sehun gasps for breath. His eyes are red and watery.

“Maybe we could go to a coffee shop instead?” Baekhyun suggests.

“No,” Sehun says. “I think I’m coming down with something. I should go.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Baekhyun says.

There’s a loud crash from inside the house, then. Baekhyun turns toward the door and scrunches his nose at it. He knows from experience that his dates find it alarming when he reacts to loud crashes in his house with nonchalance, even though he also knows that it’s a deliberate, harmless act of noisemaking. If he walks Sehun home without checking on his cats now, Sehun will think he’s a neglectful cat parent. He sighs.

“I should go check that out,” he says.

“Yeah,” Sehun says. “Um. See you later.”

Baekhyun slips in the front door and glares at the completely unchanged interior. 

“You fuckers,” he says.

“What?” Jongdae says. “You’re the one who was going to try out virgin blood magic on that unsuspecting kid.”

He’s back to human form now, sitting on the couch in a nice cable-knit sweater and slacks, judgmental expression at full force.

“I was not,” Baekhyun says. “I just wanted to get laid.”

“Sure,” Minseok says. “That’s all you wanted. We believe you.”

Baekhyun glares. It’s kind of hard when Minseok is looking adorable in a new witch hat—complete with purple ribbon and silver spiders decorating the brim. One of the spiders climbs off the edge, trailing a silver web behind itself down in front of Minseok’s face. Minseok catches it on a finger and guides it back up to the brim of the hat. 

“So what if I wanted some virgin blood magic? It only takes a tiny prick. He’d hardly feel a thing,” Baekhyun says. 

“And he’d have a giant hangover the next day, plus a good chance of lingering misconceptions about sex.”

“Nothing worse than the sneeze powder Jongdae threw at him when I wasn’t looking,” Baekhyun says.

“Look, we’ve talked about this,” Minseok says, crossing his arms. “No nonconsensual virgin blood magic.”

“You didn’t even give me a chance to ask for consent!”

“Were you going to tell him you’re a witch?”

Of course he wasn’t. Baekhyun pouts and stays silent. Jongdae sidles up behind him and wraps arms around his waist.

“What do you need him for, when you’ve got us?”

“I don’t know, enough power to generate a seeker spell so we don’t have to waste any more time pretending to be college students just to find one fugitive banshee?”

“You’d need more than one virgin for that,” Jongdae says.

“I don’t mind.”

“You know it doesn’t make sense to break rules in the middle of trying to enforce them?” Minseok says, coming closer.

He looks dangerous, with the sleeves of his sweater pushed up to show his lower arms. There’s a bit of a scowl on his face. It’s more than a little sexy, at least until the intrepid spider drips itself off the edge of the hat again. Baekhyun shudders.

“Okay, so there is definitely some kind of sexy punishment coming, and I am totally okay with that,” Baekhyun says.

Minseok quirks an eyebrow at him.

“I mean, um, shaking in my boots,” Baekhyun says. “Really. But the hat needs to go somewhere far away, first.”


	2. witch better have my money

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rules of witchcraft regarding currency are as follows: witches shall not make currency, nor shall witches move currency in large quantities from one economy to another.
> 
> That's all.

“I’m just saying,” Baekhyun hisses. “If it’s ‘just a matter of transistor gates’, and computers also have transistor gates, why can’t you just do what normal identity thieves do and do this from home?”

“Baekhyun, why do you only remember enough of my computer talk to make dumb comments at _highly_ inappropriate times?” Jongdae hisses back.

He’s currently standing in front of a fancy electronic lock on the front door of a mansion. It’s two stories, with red brick all around the first floor and the second floor painted a pale yellow. The whole yard is surrounded by a brick gate, with a pathway kept clear of weeds stretching between the front door and the sidewalk in front of the house. 

If the walkway is ever used for anything, it’s only walking the dog. Anyone else looking to enter would probably use the door by the driveway.

That means that the front door is the perfect place for three people who don’t want to be discovered to enter, particularly if one of them is as skilled at illusions as Baekhyun. (Jongdae and Minseok are so lucky to have him. They don’t appreciate him enough.)

Unfortunately for Baekhyun, however, the lock’s got an eye scanner, which Baekhyun can’t trick via illusion without knowing what the owner’s eyes looks like. Fortunately, it’s easy enough for Jongdae to get through.

In the meantime, Minseok claps his hand over Baekhyun’s mouth to shut him up. It’s sexy. Kind of like everything Minseok does.

As tempted as Baekhyun is to lick the hand or shove his ass back against Minseok, though, there’s a time and a place for everything. He stays put.

“How many times do I have to tell you that my noise interference works best if I just _don’t have to interfere with any noise_?” Minseok hisses. “I know you learned this shit!”

There’s an audible clack as the lock mechanism eases open, and Jongdae gestures for Baekhyun to solidify their invisibility spell—which he does with a hand on his mouth, because some people just do not know how to show gratitude.

Then it’s a matter of Jongdae spelling the door sensor to keep the circuit from breaking when they open the door, and they’re inside. 

The good news about a house with dogs is that the owners rarely bother with infrared scanners anywhere other than rooms with valuables. The coven, in turn, rarely bothers with that kind of theft. It’s better to take money, which doesn’t have to be sold before they can use it. It’s just a shame modern money is such a pain in the ass to steal.

The dogs, of course, were knocked out long ago with bites from Minseok’s tranquilizer spiders. Baekhyun doesn’t like to dwell on those beyond wishing he’d use them on the people, too. Then they wouldn’t have to be so quiet.

Once they’re inside, everything is almost boring. Jongdae locates the nearest computer and logs into it using the password Minseok had caught the old wife of the household typing during a boring day full of good, old-fashioned scrying. (He keeps saying he’ll figure out how to do passive surveillance with the spiders one day, but he hasn’t yet. Baekhyun suspects he just likes sitting on his ass and scrying all day.)

There’s not much security beyond that. The old woman uses some kind of password management system that makes it incredibly easy to log into her bank account and, after a good cry at the number of commas in the account balance, transfer twenty thousand dollars to—

“They have a fucking Make America Great Again sign out front,” Minseok says. “When the Obama era was clearly pretty damn good to them.”

—forty thousand dollars to a bank account that regular law enforcement will never be able to trace, even after the illusion spell wears off and the owners of the account notice that they’re down forty thousand bucks.

As they work, the two tranquilizer spiders make their way over the couch and up into the folds of Minseok’s hood. Minseok waves over his shoulder at them, and they both reach up with their front legs to stroke his finger once.

Jongdae closes out of the browser, and Minseok runs a scrubber spell over the keyboard to make extra sure there aren’t any prints. 

There’s a grand total of one tense incident when someone on the second floor starts to move around. All three of the witches freeze at the first sound of footsteps. Baekhyun feels out the edges of the invisibility spell and tightens it up.

They wait.

A door closes, and a few moments later a toilet flushes. The person seems to go back to bed.

Baekhyun tries not to let his disappointment show as they wait a little longer before moving, just in case. It’s more fun when they’re almost caught. He gets to see people stare straight at him without seeing him. 

(Sometimes he sneaks up behind them and breathes on their necks just to add a little fear to their lives.)

Minseok and Jongdae prefer these heists to be as smooth as possible, of course, because they’re boring people.

“I can’t believe you encouraged us to take more money,” Jongdae says later, when they’ve climbed into their faux Lexus in a nearby church parking lot. 

There’s a tall guy playing Pokemon Go under a nearby tree. He won’t have noticed them enough to remember them, thanks to some misdirection. While Minseok and Jongdae are occupied with getting the car started, Baekhyun casts a ready-made illusion of an Eevee over to stand in front of the gamer.

The gamer looks up from his phone, sees the Eevee, and falls over onto his ass. Baekhyun pulls the illusion back and doubles over in his seat trying not to laugh out loud.

“It’ll last us longer,” Minseok says, blissfully unaware of Baekhyun’s trick. “Which means fewer chances of getting caught doing it. If you’d just learn how to hack these accounts from home, though.”

“There would still be more chances of getting caught,” Jongdae says. “Just because you don’t understand the ways people get caught on computers…”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Shut up,” Jongdae says. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be stealing credit cards.”

“Because this is so much better.”

“It is, and you know it.”

“I miss cash,” Baekhyun says. “Like back when you could just nip some out of people’s pockets at the mall and have enough to cover your rent for the month after just a day or two.”

Everyone in the car sighs.

 

“Why the fuck does it have to be against the rules to just make money out of other things?” Jongdae asks.

He rests his head on the table next to the sheet of spelled paper to which he’s been pulling pages of articles on quantum computing. It’s always been funny to Baekhyun that their electricity wizard prefers reading on paper to reading on a computer, especially when he's reading about computers.

“Because it always causes—“ Minseok starts.

“Inflation,” Jongdae finishes. “Yeah, I know. I get it. We have to work with extant money to avoid causing economic collapse. It was a rhetorical question. I just mean we’re doomed when this quantum shit starts hitting the commercial world, because I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to hack it. My spoof bank won't survive.”

“You'll be able to hack it,” Minseok says. 

Jongdae just grunts. He starts to wand a new page onto his sheet of paper.

Baekhyun slips up behind him and takes the wand out of his hand. He sets it down on the table, then rests his hands on Jongdae’s shoulders and feels for knots to work out.

“We’ve got a few years, anyway,” he says. “You’ve got time to figure it out.”

“And what are you going to be doing to help?”

“I,” Baekhyun says, planting a kiss on Jongdae’s cheek. “Will be here making sure you remember to take breaks to receive fabulous, stress-relieving sex.” 

“You’re terrible.”

Jongdae leans into Baekhyun’s hands and closes his eyes. Baekhyun grins.

“Yep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is <3


	3. creeping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Minseok goes on a little spying mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short little thing. Happy Halloween, everyone!

There’s something crawling on Minseok’s neck. He stifles a groan and scoops it off to verify that it really is a spider. 

It is. A tiny one, no less. He sighs and sets it on his ear with the usual spell to stay put.

“We don’t need any spider heroics,” he says. 

He’s incognito today, in a simple hoody and sweats. A spider helix piercing doesn’t really go with the outfit, but it’s more convincing than anything else he can think of. Casting a glamor on it would be too much of a pain.

He walks into the coffee shop just off campus and notes with dismay that all of the tables are taken. He’s not really here for the coffee, but to surveil; every spider he’s sent here since he figured out how to make them do surveillance for him has dropped off the radar soon after. It’s better to come in person. 

It doesn’t hurt that there’s coffee.

He doesn’t dare use any tricks to open up a seat for himself here, lest he give himself away to the target they’ve been tracking or the person who set anti-scrying wards around the coffee shop. He’s forced to resort to standing in line and praying, like a normal student, that a spot will open up before his coffee is made.

The barista who takes his order is the one with the thick lips and natural glare. He smiles warmly when Minseok approaches the counter, but then his eyes shift to Minseok’s ear, and the smile drops. Hopefully he’s just judgmental. Hopefully he hasn’t seen any similar spiders hanging around. 

Minseok orders a small light roast coffee with a smile, trying to act casual.

The barista opens his mouth, and Minseok holds his breath.

“We don’t have any light roast ready,” the barista says. “I’ll have to make some. Is that okay?”

Minseok nods and pays. 

As expected, a table opens up before the barista finishes making the pour over. It’s not perfect for surveillance, but it at least has a clear view of the door. Minseok claims it and watches. And watches.

When the crowds start to thin in early evening, he sits back in his chair with a sigh and rubs his eyes. He’s seen enough drama to write a TV show, but still no sign of a banshee, nor whatever might cause a banshee to make the amount of ruckus this one has been making.

Someone sets two cups in front of him.

Minseok looks up to see the barista with RBF, who takes the chair across from him—had there been a chair there? Minseok is pretty sure it was commandeered for a group study session two tables over, but maybe they returned it—and moves one of the cups over to Minseok. 

It’s a standard paper coffee cup, with the flap on the travel lid closed to seal it off. It makes a hollow clop when the barista sets it back down in front of Minseok. 

It tingles under Minseok’s fingers when he takes it. He cracks the lid open and peeks inside, not particularly surprised to find three silver spiders staring up at him. They start to walk toward the top of the cup, and Minseok replaces the lid. A bunch of spiders walking out of a coffee cup would be hard to explain.

At least they’re alive. 

“What about my shop being warded against scrying made you think I’d be okay with spying spiders?” 

Minseok shrugs.

“The hope was that you wouldn’t notice.”

“Well, I did.” the barista says. “So don’t do it. If I ever catch you trying out remote spying methods again, I’ll ward the shop against you.”

“Why aren’t you banning me right now?”

The barista shrugs. 

“Your intentions are good.”

“How do you know that?” Minseok asks, miffed. What kind of witch has good intentions? 

“I can tell,” the barista says. “I’m Kyungsoo, by the way.”

“Minseok,” Minseok says.

He extends his hand across the table, and Kyungsoo shakes it.

“Can I ask what you’re looking for?” He asks.

“The banshee everyone’s been hearing,” Minseok says. “She’s making people nervous.”

“Lots of people make people nervous.”

“Not a lot of people make me nervous,” Minseok says. “I’d like to know what’s up.” 

“I see,” Kyungsoo says. “Well, you’re as free as anyone to come in when we’re open, but no more than that.”

“I guess I’ll be drinking a lot of coffee,” Minseok says.

What a sad, sad fate.


End file.
